Holdfast Trend Strength measures the correlation between price and time: how much of a move was a straight line, and how much was noise that happened to end somewhere. It is the question momentum does not answer.
Two markets move forty points. One walks there bar after bar, taking every dip; the other spends the session lurching in both directions and happens to finish forty points up. Every distance-based tool reads them the same. They are not the same, and you would trade them differently.
What separates them is order: how much of the move happened in sequence. That is measurable — it is the correlation between price and the passage of time — and it is a different axis from direction, from distance, and from volume.
Every bar of the window stepped up in order. Nothing chopped, nothing retraced far enough to break the sequence.
Price went nowhere in particular. It may have travelled a long way and come back; it did not do it in a line.
An orderly decline. The measure is symmetric, and the reading means the same thing on either side of zero.
The crossover rule, which is the part that matters. A zero-line cross on its own is noise — in a chop, price crosses back and forth every few bars. So a cross is only marked once the reading has reached the threshold in the direction it crossed. If it turns back through zero first, that was a graze and nothing is ever drawn. When it does confirm, the line is drawn back at the bar the cross began, because that is the event; the threshold is only the evidence it meant something.
The pane plots one series — your chart or a secondary timeframe. Two curves in one pane is two answers to the same question, and the second one always ends up being read as confirmation of the first.
The crossover lines are different: they can come from the chart, the secondary, or both, drawn on the price chart where the bars are. Each source gets its own bull color, bear color, opacity, width and style — so the two sources are distinguishable at a glance, which is what you actually need to tell apart.
| Reading | What it suggests |
|---|---|
| Strong and holding | A move that is being pressed. Pullbacks inside it have been shallow enough not to break the sequence. |
| Strong and falling | The move is still in the direction it was, but the order is going out of it. Often the first sign before price does anything obvious. |
| Near zero | No sequence. Whatever else your chart is telling you, it is not telling you this is a trend. |
What it is not. Not a direction call, not an entry, and not a strength-of-move-in-points measure. A quiet, orderly grind can read +0.9 while barely moving. That is the tool working correctly: it is measuring order, and someone else is measuring distance.
| Setting | What it does | Default |
|---|---|---|
| Length | Bars in the correlation window. Shorter reacts faster and crosses more often | 14 |
| Crossover threshold | How far past zero the reading must get before a cross is confirmed and drawn | 0.25 |
| Pane timeframe | Which series the plot and its shading are built from — chart or secondary | chart |
| Crossover line timeframes | Which series draw lines on the price chart — chart, secondary, or both | chart |
| Secondary timeframe | The second series, loaded only when the pane or the lines ask for it | 5 Minute |
| Line style, per source | Bull color, bear color, opacity, width and dash — color differs by direction, the rest by source | solid / dashed |
| Fill mode | Shade under the line as it runs, or tint the whole pane by the latest reading | Historical |
Requirements: NinjaTrader 8, MetaTrader 5, or TradingView. Any instrument, any bar type, any feed.
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HoldfastTrendStrength.zip — NinjaTrader 8.mq5 — MetaTrader 5.pine — TradingViewOne email to deliver it, then occasional notes on order flow and new tools. No sharing, no selling, one-click unsubscribe on every email. You can also just read the documentation first — it is the complete guide, no email required.
Yes. No license key, no expiry, no nag screen. It used to be a paid tool called Holdfast Grip; it is free now, under a name that says what it measures.
Related question, different math. ADX measures directional movement strength through smoothed ranges. This is the correlation of price against time over a window — how much of the move happened in sequence. A market can have a high ADX and a mediocre reading here, and that difference is usually worth a look.
They mark a change in the quality of the move, not a trade. What they are good for is context: a breakout that happens while this is confirming in the same direction is a different proposition from one that happens while it is falling apart.
Because it waited for the threshold. The line is drawn back at the bar the cross actually happened, so what you see is the event, dated correctly, once it had earned the mark.
Its lines are drawn when the secondary bar closes, and they do not move afterwards. A 5-minute crossing is not a fact until the 5-minute bar is finished.
Trend Strength says how orderly. It does not say which way, how far, or where: Trend Ribbon for the lean and whether price still agrees with it, ATR Band for whether a distance is ordinary, and Liquidity Levels for where real resting size sits in the book.